Jennifer Goulden
Founder, Entourage Media
Zoho Forms or BookFunnel are my go-to apps for all ARC signups. I recently used ManyChat with a paid Facebook campaign giving away free ARCs for an author without a following. We earned 400 or so ARC readers and achieved Amazon bestseller (for free Kindle e-books), but it didn’t translate into many reviews. I wouldn’t do it again. I have just begun using UpViral for building email lists and social followers and I love it. I find myself pressing refresh on the dashboard as our total of leads, shares, and followers increases by the minute. It is easy for a giveaway to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, so getting the key elements right makes a difference. Once you finish your campaign, you’re able to focus on warming up the thousands of new emails and bring their recipients into the author’s community as true followers.
Mailchimp is sufficient for email nurture and launch sequences, but over a certain number of emails, it gets expensive, so you might as well splurge on something a bit more intelligent like ActiveCampaign. Aside from email signups, it seems like the more I automate, the lower my results. The more personal the messaging, the better. I find that email warm-up sequences written by humans do better than those with AI, so I’ll stick with that for the foreseeable future.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes
Kingdom Anywhere Publishing
Substack is a game-changer for serious writers. By allowing authors to connect directly with a flourishing literary community, the sky is the limit in terms of new subscriptions and opportunities to sell our latest novels “without selling them.” Nobody wants to be told to buy something. But when readers see that a writer on Substack has had success with publishing their novel— and that the reviews are positive and consistently coming in—Substack functions as a roundtable type of space for readers to discover the author’s book without shoving it down their throat, so to speak. Via my Substack, I was able to sell 300 limited first editions of my latest novel in six months, which allowed me to justify expanding into global distribution via Ingram Spark and becoming a member of IBPA.
Ian Henzel
Managing Publisher, Rattling Good Yarns Press
We use a plethora of tools: NightCafe for image generation. ChatGPT for beefing up our social media posting texts. TinyUrl for URL-specific tracking. MonsterInsights, a reporting tool integrated with our website. Jet CRM and MailPoet are also integrated with our website. We also created our own in-house customized sales and royalty tracking system that allows us to do a deep analysis of our sales and revenue sources.
Dee Marley
Editor-in-Chief, Historium Press & Xanadu Press
As editor-in-chief, I bring 40 years of experience in graphic design, so using various graphic providers, we use InDesign and Affinity to develop in-house graphics for marketing, etc. We also, at times, use Canva.
Wayne Bell
CEO and Founder, Really Big Coloring Books®
We are beginning to understand AI more and more and use it as a valuable design and marketing tool. AI enhances both creativity and productivity in the most unexpected ways. Can’t be afraid of AI or ignore it; learning to use AI is a good policy at our company. AI is tool, an asset, not a competitor or replacement.
Janis Robinson Daly
Novelist and Author Marketing Consultant
Canva is worth every penny of its subscription. From designing Facebook posts to PowerPoint templates, to notecards designs. Super easy to use.
Lisa Norman
Heart Ally Books LLC
World Anvil: a writing and story bible tool that also creates author and book-focused websites. Tied in with a strong community so it helps with marketing as well.
Julie Broad
Founder, Book Launchers
Publisher Rocket is my favorite tool for market research. We use it every day for keyword research and category research on Amazon. The data is so robust we can identify categories where there are more opportunities for a book to stand out. We can then drill down into what formats are performing best and what keywords in that category have search volume and buying intent. Now with their reverse ASIN lookup feature, we can research any book on Amazon and learn what categories and keywords are working for that book, too.
Anna Maria DiDio
Love at the Border Publishing
If I am stuck on a particular topic, I ask Perplexity for ideas. I get a realistic framework to continue writing or develop a specific strategy based on that input.
Bill Thompson
Author-Publisher, Ascendente Books
Hands down it’s Scrivener. What a wonderful writing program. Although it requires investing time in learning how its various parts work, there are excelle
nt tutorials that will help you figure it out. I use its character development feature extensively, and every location (town, building, house, etc.) has its own file with detailed descriptions. Seeing what I’ve already put there keeps me from being redundant and from making errors in the description.
One of the most useful aspects of this program is the ability to create chapters and seamlessly move them around. When I start a book, and when I get stuck and don’t know where to go, I often skip to a new subject entirely, knowing I’ll go back and fill in the blanks later. With Scrivener, moving chapters is simple. I also religiously use the project targets, setting my daily target and my project target as a whole. This keeps me on schedule. And the program’s ability to auto-save every two minutes has been a Godsend in the past. Entire manuscript disappeared in a computer crash? No problem. Go to the first backup in the cloud, and there it is!
When it’s time to convert to Word or PDF for editing or forwarding to beta readers, the tasks are as easy as a few clicks. In summary, it’s inexpensive, pays for itself in no time, and the tech support (which I have only needed once or twice in years) is responsive and knowledgeable. I wouldn’t use anything else to write my novels.